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Turkish Occidentalism and Representations of Western Women in Turkish Media

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Turkish Occidentalism and Representations of Western Women in Turkish Media Turkish Occidentalism and Representations of Western Women in Turkish Media Per Bauhn Fatma Fulya Tepe professor of practical philosophy linnaeus university [email protected] assistant professor istanbul aydın university [email protected] Abstract “Occidentalism” is an umbrella term for various stereotyped images of the West. It is typically gendered, implying views of Western moral standards that are often filtered through a certain perception of Western women. We will look at the particular case of Turkish media representations of Western women from the point of view of occidentalism. Western women are described in positive terms when they choose to marry Turkish men, convert to Islam, and move to Turkey. On the other hand, when these women are described in their Western context, they are often portrayed as morally and sexually confused. We hypothesize that these descriptions of Western women exemplify a Turkish occidentalism, morally othering the West and Western women. While our material may not suffice to say anything about the representativity of these views, it is at least sufficient to confirm and illustrate a hypothesis that such an occidentalism indeed exists in Turkish media. keywords: occidentalism, Turkey, Western women, Turkish media, othering To cite this article: Bauhn, P. and Tepe, F. F. (2017). Turkish Occidentalism and Representations of Western Women in Turkish Media. İleti-ş-im, Galatasaray University Journal of Communication, 26, 65-82. DOI: 10.16878/gsuilet.324193. 66 İleti-ş-im 26 • haziran/june/juin 2017 Résumé Occidentalisme turc et représentations des femmes occidentales dans les médias turcs “L’occidentalisme” est un terme générique pour diverses images stéréotypées de l’Occident. Il est typiquement sexué, impliquant des points de vues sur les normes morales occidentales qui sont souvent filtrées à travers une certaine perception des femmes occidentales. Nous examinerons le cas particulier des représentations média turques des femmes occidentales du point de vue de l’occidentalisme. Les femmes occidentales sont décrites en termes positifs lorsqu’elles choisissent de se marier avec des hommes turcs, de se convertir en Islam et de se déplacer en Turquie. D’autre part, lorsque ces femmes sont décrites dans leur contexte occidental, elles sont souvent représentées comme des individus moralement et sexuellement confus. Nous émettons l’hypothèse que ces descriptions des femmes occidentales illustrent un occidentalisme turc qui a moralement altérisé l’Ouest et les femmes occidentales. Bien que notre matériel ne soit pas suffisant pour dire quelque chose sur la représentativité de ces points de vue, il est au moins suffisant de confirmer et d’illustrer une hypothèse selon laquelle un tel occidentalisme existe bien dans les médias turcs. mots-clés : occidentalisme, Turquie, femmes occidentales, médias turcs, altérisation Öz Türk Oksidentalizmi ve Türk Medyasında Batılı Kadınların Temsili “Oksidentalizm”, Batı hakkındaki çeşitli klişeleşmiş imgeler için kullanılan şemsiye bir terimdir. Batılı ahlak standartlarına ilişkin görüşleri, genellikle Batılı kadınlar hakkındaki algı üzerinden oluşturulduğundan tipik olarak cinsiyetlidir. Bu makalede, oksidentalizm bakış açısından Batılı kadınların Türk medyasındaki temsiline bakacağız. Batılı kadınlar Türk erkekleri ile evlenmeyi, Müslüman olmayı ve Türkiye’ye taşınmayı seçtiklerinde olumlu olarak tanımlanmaktadır. Diğer taraftan, bu kadınlar kendi Batılı bağlamlarında tanımlandıkları zaman, genellikle ahlaki ve cinsel açıdan şaşkın ya da aklı karışık olarak resmedilir. Bu makalede Batılı kadınlar hakkındaki bu tanımlamaların, Batıyı ve Batılı kadınları ahlaken ötekileştiren bir Türk oksidentalizmini örneklediği hipotezini geliştirmekteyiz. Araştırma malzememiz bu görüşlerin genellenebilirliği hakkında herhangi bir şey söylemek için yeterli olmayabilirken, en azından bu tür bir oksidentalizmin Türk medyasında var olduğuna dair bir hipotezi doğrulamak ve örneklemek için yeterlidir. anahtar kelimeler: oksidentalizm, Türkiye, Batılı kadınlar, Türk medyası, ötekileştirme İleti-ş-im 26 • haziran/june/juin 2017 67 Fulya, why is he looking at me like that? Christa,1 a German undergraduate student, doing her internship in Istanbul, Turkey in 2005. Introduction For a period of almost six years Fulya Tepe, one of the authors of this article, used to have European students as flatmates in her apartment in Istanbul. One of these flatmates was a blond female German student, whom we will call Christa. At one point Christa told Fulya that Turkish men were staring at her in the streets of Istanbul. Fulya did not believe her at first. Perhaps it was all just a matter of cultural misunderstanding. Later, however, as they were strolling around in the city, Christa showed Fulya how Turkish men indeed stared at her. Reacting to the persistent attention given to Christa by these men, Fulya on one occasion asked one of them, “What is wrong? Why are you looking at her like that?” The man did not answer, but continued to look at Christa for a little longer, and then turned his head in another direction. Obviously, he felt himself free to stare at Christa and even to smile at her in a way suggesting that he had sex on his mind. These men acted as if they knew her from somewhere and as if they also knew how to treat her. One possible reason for their behaviour that came to Fulya’s mind at the time was that they might be identifying her flatmate with a particular image of Western woman existing in Turkish media. We now believe that this was a good guess. Moreover, it made us hypothesize that this specific Turkish media view of Western woman can be understood as a case of Turkish occidentalism. This media version of Turkish occidentalism involves a narrative, according to which Western women are sexually promiscuous and morally confused, but also possible objects for Turkish male moral rescue operations. The moral rescue operations in question involve Western women marrying Turkish men and converting to Islam. In order to substantiate our hypothesis about the existence of such a narrative, we searched for Turkish media representations of Western women during the ten year period of 2006-2015. We found sixteen news items in different Turkish main stream media describing Western women in various ways suggestive of occidentalist stereotypes. We did not find in these media any news items concerning Western women that directly contradicted or rejected such stereotypes. Of course, we cannot claim that these sixteen news pieces are representative of Turkish media in general. However, they are at least sufficient to confirm and illustrate the actual existence of occidentalist stereotypes of Western women in Turkish mainstream media. Further research 1 “Christa” is a pseudonyme. 68 İleti-ş-im 26 • haziran/june/juin 2017 would be required to find out whether these occidentalist stereotypes are also representative or perhaps even dominant in these media. It should also be noted that our findings correspond with those of a previous study of the representation of foreign women in local Turkish newspapers in the Antalya region, made by Emine Uçar Ilbuğa and Tülin Sepetçi. In their study, which did not refer to the concept of Turkish occidentalism, Ilbuğa and Sepetçi found that “foreign women are mostly presented with headlines alluding to prostitution, lying, cheating or eroticism” and when foreign women are presented in a more positive light, this refers to cases in which they had married Turkish men, “becoming home-makers and converting to Islam” (Ilbuğa and Sepetçi, 2010, pp. 41-42). These views on foreign women belong to that cluster of ideas that we will call Turkish Occidentalism, and we will show how similar views are expressed in other Turkish media as well. The Concept of Occidentalism The term “occidentalism” in academic literature is used in two internally inconsistent ways. On the one hand, we have scholars like Couze Venn, who by “occidentalism” refers to a particular Westernized discourse of modernity: Occidentalism ... is the conceptual and historical space in which a particular narrative of the subject and a particular narrative of history have been constituted; these have become hegemonic with modernization, having effects throughout the world because of the universal scope of the project of modernity and the global reach of European colonization. (Venn, 2000, p. 2) On the other hand, we have a view of occidentalism as something very different, namely, a particular stereotyped view of the West, embraced by non-Western traditionalists of various kinds. This is the view made famous by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, who have defined “occidentalism” as a “dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” and made up of a “cluster of prejudices” (Buruma and Margalit, 2004, p. 5). The historical background here is, of course, Edward Said’s concep- tualization of “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 2003, p. 3). What Buruma and Margalit have done is to reverse the discussion from one about Western stereotypes of the Orient, to one about oriental, or at least non-Western stereotypes of the West. Interestingly enough, however, there exists in the literature also a use of the term “occidentalism” that is actually almost identical with Said’s use of “orientalism”. Claudia Brunner, for instance, talks of “an occidentalist order of knowledge” according to which Western analysts “turn difference into hierarchy” by situating
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